What if a college dean barred from campus recruiting any law firm that provided free representation to al Qaeda terrorists? Suppose she believes that the firms are providing aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime.

There would be an avalanche of criticism from the media, the bar, and the professoriat because the dean had elevated her personal views above a university’s commitment to free and open access.

Nothing like that ever happened to Elena Kagan, President Obama’s solicitor general and his choice to replace Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. When she served as dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan prohibited the U.S. military from recruiting students on campus. Why? Because it discriminates against gays and lesbians under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Kagan’s decision does not just express an anti-military bias, as many conservative critics claim; it shows her attachment to the lazy liberalism of the faculty lounge. Rather than an act on principle, her decision to bar the military was the easy and popular thing to do on college and university campuses.

Her views on presidential power, which would find independent counsels to be constitutional, and her attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas reveal the same easy allegiance to the conventional wisdom of the academic Left.

2 Responses to “John Yoo On Elena Kagan”

Good find! Yeah, I think John Yoo’s analogy comparing Kagan’s barring of military recruiters with a hypothetical barring of a law firm representing terrorists is poorly conceived. Cheap plug, but check out my brief deconstruction of it at http://pawnedlicense.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/lazy-yoo/.